To wonder how we knew about celeb gossip before the internet?

[WraithBabe]

I was just on YouTube when a video of that cringy interview the Paula Yates did with Michael Hutchence on the Big Breakfast popped up (btw they look incredibly young now ) and I remembered when that happened everyone somehow knew that they both went to a hotel together afterwards and Paula and Bob Geldofs marriage therefore imploded. But how did everyone know??

At the time the only magazines I read were nme and select - I can't imagine it would have been in there, and I also don't imagine it would have been in the news, I also didn't read, or know anyone else who read, a tabloid. But I remember this being a talking point - how did it become public knowledge?

I love that interview.

Not really sure though, fromThe Sun/News of the World/Smash Hits mainly I guess. My scrap books of a band from the 80s are full of newspaper cuttings.

Gossip columns fuelled by hacks and paparazzi who stalk and snoop on celebrities have existed in newspapers and magazines ever since the invention of both printing and photography i.e. well over a century, more like a century and a half.

There was life before the Internet, hard though it may be to believe now.

Mgazines. I spent lots of my youth in the USA and always had US Weekly magazine. All the gossip.

Papers would follow them round to catch them out. Or pay for a kiss and tell or for friends to rat them out. All revealed in the big sunday special.

what @liz70 said. Celebrities and press go waaaaaaay back.

@WraithBabe 15 Million Merits?

mission yep...

News of the World used to have all the gossip. Sunday Sport (I think) too. Trash tabloids like The Star did.

Hello took off because they promised to only say nice things and show nice photos of people - all the celebs wanted to be in it.

I didn't know that about Paula Yates, by the way!

You used to get a lot of gossip from newspapers segments on tv programs even the tv mags which most of us had because we didn't have tv listings on sky or virgin boxes.

The Internet has democratised gossip. In the 1930s, everyone in London society knew about David Windsor and Wallis Simpson's affair, as contemporary accounts (the essential diaries of Chips Channon, say) attest. While the general population didn't, and the fact that there was a constitutional crisis brewing was entirely unknown.

News of the World was a good source of information

I used to love a Sunday morning read of the 'News of the Screws'. Got gossip daily in the Bizarre column in the Sun, before doing the Sundial word puzzle during my lunch break.

All the Sunday 'Red tops' ... News of the Screws, Sunday People, Sunday Mirror, all peddled gossip.

It was all in the News of the World and just 17

Heat magazine!

I always wonder how "Jimmy Savile does things with corpses" made it into my primary school in South Wales in the early 90s. How was it that specific?!

Life before the internet/ mobiles / tech in general / I often wonder how we survived. It was boring!
News of the world had all the gossip usually.

Jimmy Savilles proclivities were quite well known (in the north)I had also heard stuff about him in the morgue.

There would also have been some rumours based on the way he looked and acted.

A stopped clock and all that jazz.